


You Are Enough

by colorworld



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (nothing insane), Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, BAMF Helen Cho, Blood, Bruce Banner is an Amazing Doctor, Cutting, Depression, Emotional, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Genderbent! Peter Parker - Freeform, Helen Cho is an amazing doctor and woman, Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Penny Parker - Freeform, Penny's First Breakup, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter's First Breakup, Self-Doubt, Self-Harm, Self-Worth Issues, Tony Stark Acting as Penny Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark realizes he's a parent, Weight Gain, Weight Issues, Worried May Parker (Spider-Man), Worried Tony, Worried Tony Stark, cause healthy coping mechanisms, running away to the woods, thats it thats the fic no im kidding, triggering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 06:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26967703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colorworld/pseuds/colorworld
Summary: Rejected from M.I.T. Broken up with M.J. Two innocent people are dead because she couldn't save them. Penny is at her lowest and shows it in one of the worst ways possible. Tony is determined to help his daughter (now that he realizes he's her parent whether by blood or bond) pick herself back up.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Tony Stark, Bruce Banner & Tony Stark & Helen Cho, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Penny Parker & Natasha Romanov, Penny Parker and Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Natasha Romanov, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 69





	You Are Enough

**Author's Note:**

> so....i haven't uploaded a fic since April 3rd. It's October 12th....SO I HOPE 15K WORDS IS SATISFYING
> 
> I know this is a very very heavy topic so please read the tags before reading if you are bothered or triggered by these subjects! Speaking of heavy subjects, I have read and edited my work a lot and consulted with someone who's good at writing this kind of stuff for accuracy. To an extent, everyone has a different idea of what's accurate because everyone has different experiences, but there's also stuff that should probably be obvious to me. The point is, if you have constructive criticism about the portrayal of mental health in this fic, drop it in the comments! I want to learn so I write better next time!
> 
> I got the title from You Are Enough by Sleeping At Last (S.A.L. is amazing). Why this song? It's in the title. Is the song fitting? uhhhhh idk i just liked the title. But the title without the song just makes it some words, so is it really cause of the song? ....i'm weird, leave me alone
> 
> Anyways, I hope you like the fic! Comments are incredibly appreciated and motivate me to write more work! I love all of your love, kudos, and comments! Thank you for reading!

The door slams closed, she collapses to the floor, and the bomb exploded against all hope.

Penny’s tears make up the closest waterfall you can find in Inner Queens, what a lovely attraction to spectate of a broken girl. From her core, her bones feel like they might just shatter at any moment, the roaring anxiety about to let her fail. Blood and pressure rushes to the front of her head and sinuses. In a fit of grill-like searing anger, she throws her backpack off her shoulders and to the other side of the room. All that backpack covered in things that brought her joys (cute Redbubble pins and Etsy patches) had inside was merely a portion of what was bringing her excruciating pain.

The teen’s monstrous hurricane isn’t calming. It doesn’t even have a serene eye to it, making it more like a simple storm, but this was far from a simple storm. This was not anything she’s felt quite like this before. Everything miniscule and ginormous amounted to this period of time where her soul dropped its cool.

Time is slow, but it’s just Penny’s false reality. The time Penny is crumbled like a piece of paper on the floor of her bedroom lasts eternity, but it’s only an hour before she sees the time stare back at her from the wall clock. Five in the evening.

She could have checked her phone for the time, like usual, but Penny hadn’t changed her wallpaper yet. It was too painful to look at the girlfriend she had just lost. MJ may have not died, but she was feeling as if she’d lost a part of her. Maybe, at the surface, breaking up with your first girlfriend after dating her for six months as a seventeen-year-old-girl isn’t a huge deal, but it was to her. Especially on the pie chart with everything else in her life that hurt her.

With a dried, melted face of makeup and sinuses that make it almost impossible for her to breath, Penny crawls up from her position and onto her bed. There, she sits still, feeling the lingering of the horrific breakdown. It wasn’t over. Just dormant and recharging.

The peachy pink school backpack still sits in the corner. All of the homework, the papers, the calculator, the folders, and more. Is it even worth it? What did she work for? M.I.T _rejected_ her! Not waitlisted, but _rejected!_ It broke her heart after the blood, sweat, tears, and all that came with it. As for the other schools including Fordham, Columbia, CalPolyTech, C.I.T, and others? Still incoming. Columbia, however, was also a rejection. Someone else had her spot at both of those schools, and that was ok, she guessed. They were smarter with a better G.P.A, perfect test scores, and masterfully crafted essays. Penny thought she had that and she put her soul into it. Not enough soul, she supposed.

She opens up the drawer, pulling out her makeup wipes. Penny feels like she’s scraping the makeup off her face, seeing its thick stain on the wipes. She tosses them in the trash and then does nothing.

Penny leans over, letting her head rest (but it’s never true rest for her) in her hand. It stops them from shaking and gives them the job of keeping her heavy head up. It’s a tough task with the crown that holds the world’s weight within it. There’s no guarantee they can hold it.

The spidersuit she wore with pride and a grin lies in the closet on the floor, sounds of shouts and gunshots resuming in her head from where they left off earlier in the day. Not to mention how she looked heavier and rounder than she used to in the suit. All the stress eating and impulsivity added up. She failed the Avengers, she failed the people she tried to save, and she failed Mr. Stark. That failure was something Penny found excruciating to live with.

A couple was in a common case being held up by armed robbers. Even with life itself weighing like gallons of the ocean inside of her, Penny couldn’t do nothing. She tried her best, but her attempts failed, leaving the couple dead and Natasha, who intervened at convenient timing, shot in the arm. Two people had to be buried and one close to her had to have a bullet removed from her arm. Not even one of the biggest things in her life was she good at, anymore. Her purpose was no longer her purpose. She had none.

No purpose. No love from anyone or anything. No item that brings her joy, lately. Only anxiety, stress, and depression. Not even the ghosts of good things hang around to lift her chin up.

She has to remove the weight. Or at least she could give it a try.

Penny abandons her room. May isn’t home yet and she wouldn’t be for another two or three hours, tonight. Busy shift in a busy city. The only thing the teen brings with her is her phone, money, and subway card. Nothing else. Only Penny, the clothes on her body, money, card, and the phone in her pocket.

Everything is left behind. The apartment, the food, the school, the family, the friends, all of it she could. Penny leaves Queens with no destination, she just wanted to run away, even if it hurt. The hurt was numbing on her like a mouse eating cheese. Most of the pain was still there, but the little thoughts in her head acted like she didn’t care, anymore.

She boards the subway and with the most obnoxious impulse she can come up with, she finds herself taking it as far away from the city as she could. Ok, maybe not the farthest away she could, because that would mean boarding a plane for China or Norway. Penny takes the subway to White Plains and then a bus even farther from the biggest city in America. The sun was soon to go down, one of the most dangerous times to be outside alone (and as a teenage girl) in New York, even if not in the city, but she didn’t care. What she did care about, however, is that she wasn’t good enough. Not for the deceased Angie and Caleb Davis, not for M.I.T or Columbia, not for Natasha, not for MJ, not for May, and not for the man who was the closest thing to a dad she would ever have.

Even though Penny starts to feel stupid as the bus ride to Doodletown (I’m not joking), New York begins, she’s in too deep to stop now. If May and Tony didn’t know where she was and wondered why, did it matter? She’s only disappointed them.

Bear Mountain State Park was peaceful and was sure to be mostly lacking people on a weeknight. When she returned, anger would probably ensue over her being gone, but they’re only missing a skeleton and a face of Penny Parker. What made her Penny Parker on the inside wasn’t good, anymore, so for a little while, she was going away.

The forty-minute bus ride finally ends, Penny rushing off the bus and getting to the state park entrance. Sure, there’s attractions here like the zoo and the swimming pool, but it’s none of that she’s looking for. Freedom is nearby, but she pauses in her tracks. From her pocket, Penny pulls out her phone. No texts. No calls. No one. Just the ability to be tracked.

She thinks of how to abandon it, but it’s no use. Penny can always be found. It’s useless. She tucks it back into her jacket and continues on her journey.

The state park is slightly busier than expected, but she had more pain than expected, so nothing new. The fall evening is crisp and, usually, the idea of an apple-scented candle and hot chocolate would be a fun idea for a night this lovely. But for tonight, even if it was only an hour, she wanted to feel alone where it was quieter than her home.

Bear Mountain’s shortest trail was, still, satisfying. Sunset was upon her, not encouraging nor discouraging her to reach her location. Penny’s thoughts don’t stop rambling, not in the slightest. This was somewhere Ben and her would go when he was still alive. She was smaller, more innocent, and happier as young children deserve to be. His death still weighs on her like bricks piled on bricks because of the memories and the nightmares, but she’s always tried her best. Penny isn’t so sure if it’s enough, anymore.

She looks down at the trail and her discounted short Ugg boots and wants to think right, but she doesn’t know how, but she wants to think, but none of it is right. Two dreams were stripped of her, a third non-academic one, too. If it wasn’t stripped from her, she must have stripped everyone’s trust in her from the people she cared about most. The fighting, the failure, the moodiness, the pain. Burdensome. Sad. To remove herself from the equation, even temporarily, was the answer.

Minutes on minutes pass away and tears are rising to Penny’s eyes, a natural side effect of the anxiety. The sun peers through the trees, illuminating autumn’s lovely hues. She speeds her pace, motivated to reach the sight needed to be seen. This won’t leave like opportunity and loved ones will. This one stays.

In spite of all her monsters, there’s a tiny creature rising up in her that feels victorious. The sun shines over the New York landscape. The trees, the water, and the sky is blue. But now that she’s here, was it worth it?

No. It changed nothing. The tiny creature died.

Penny’s face falls back to depression as she sits on the concrete ground against a rock. The leaves bristle, the sun sets, and a squirrel is seen scampering around the landscape. Unnoticeably, the air lessens in temperature by the minute. The low for the night was a chilly thirty-eight degrees, not that Penny had looked. Worse than that, her only defense mechanism against the cold was a cardigan on top of clothes that were good for seventy-degree weather, not an October night like this. Too bad she wasn’t in Florida, right now. It was warmer there.

She’ll care about the weather later, but not right now. Crestfallen is an understatement. The biggest things, the things in the middle, and the tiny things added up. The irritability, the forgetfulness, the brain fog, the anxiety, the depression, the fits of anger all hurt like hell and beyond. Penny knew she chased everyone away with it. She killed people with it, too.

Silence sits with her, Penny practically frozen with her eyes glued to the ground rather than the view she chased for over an hour. From her jean pockets, she pulls something out.

A week ago, Penny broke a glass of water in her room during one of her frequent mental breakdowns. All were cleaned up but one that she found under her bed just a few days ago. She missed it.

She holds it over her left arm and does nothing. These past months have brought her here and time just couldn’t be reversed. She couldn’t change her mistakes.

Penny sighs. She tucks the glass shard back in her pocket.

* * *

Tony’s worried about Penny.

A plethora of things weigh on his mind all the time, but it’s about his mentee, right now. It’s Thursday night and she’s cancelled coming to the tower like she usually does indefinitely citing that she needed time away from stress. He immediately understood, of course, but that was two weeks ago. Was that long or short? Tony wasn’t sure. The only contact he’s had with her since was a few text messages making sure she was ok.

May, on the other hand, talked to her in the morning and at night when work wasn’t an issue, or over the weekend. But she’s communicated to Tony that she’s growing distant and putting up walls. He saw that from the moment she cut off the internship, temporarily. Or at least he hoped she meant it temporarily. It meant a lot to Penny, so if she didn’t want to put her passion into it for two weeks on top of all the other things in her life, something was really wrong. That’s what Tony thought, at least.

For the night since six, Tony’s been trying desperately to focus on his work, but it hasn’t been working out, so well. He finally just stops, leaning back in his seat, and ponders what to do for a moment. “…Gummy bears.”

He gets a bowl of them. Maybe too big of a bowl. Life was short and so was the period of every time he tried to get on a diet and eat healthy. Tony starts munching through them on the cushy, five-figure sofa and turns on the tv to the news. The same old bullshit goes on in the world. Politics, war, crime, and scandals.

Boring.

Tony puts on Netflix and scrolls through what’s on. He snorts when he finds She Ra: Princesses of Power on his watch list. Penny put that there because, despite it being a DreamWorks cartoon remake of an old eighties tv show, it was supposed to be really good, so he didn’t bother to remove it because then Penny would add it back on, anyways. Was there a new cooking show that would be good?

His phone starts to ring and vibrate. Tony pulls it from his pocket and sees it’s May. It was probably nothing, right? “Hello?”

“Is Penny at the tower?”

“Nope. She not at home, yet? It’s nine at night, it’s way past her curfew.” Not to mention that it was Thursday. “Have you tried checking with M.J’s mom or dad? Maybe Pen and M.J. got back together.”

“I already did, Penny’s not there.”

Deep-rooted concern rises up in him, but he tries not to sound like it is. “Probably running late, May, it happens every once in a while.”

“Not at Ned’s, either. She’s not picking up my calls or returning my texts,” May’s audibly growing more and more stressed. “Pen never takes longer than half an hour to answer me and it’s been two hours.”

Two hours? “Why didn’t you contact me ‘till now?”

“Because I had faith in her and that it was probably nothing, Tony, but now I’m really worried. There’s been more shootings at night, lately, and her mental health really has been taking a toll. I’ve been taking her to therapy and making sure she takes her meds and I’m trying my best I can to be there for her, but work is piling up, and I don’t know if I’m saying the right things-“ May rambles.

“I hear you, May. Let me try to call her, ok?” Tony calmly attempts to reassure May.

“Ok. See you in a bit.”

“Bye.” Tony hangs up and instantly goes to call Penny, holding his breath and hoping that the teenage girl would answer. When she doesn’t, Tony swears the blood is draining from his face. His worry is skyrocketing like a very good year on the stock market and that’s not the best-case scenario.

He goes to her text message page, briefly noticing the contact picture of Penny with her beautiful smile, before typing as fast as his thumbs could go without making obnoxious spelling mistakes that would either autocorrect to the right thing or something even worse. Just something saying that he understands she hasn’t picked up her phone and May is very worried, plus it’s dark out and Queens is not a good place at night.

Five minutes pass and Tony was convinced she wasn’t going to answer either of them.

He calls May. “So I never like doing this, May, because it’s kinda invasive, but I’m just gonna ping her phone and we’ll see where she is, ok? If that doesn’t work, I’ll try her suit. Fri, track Penny’s phone, please?”

Within just a mere moment, his A.I. pulls up the location of her phone and if Tony hadn’t paled before, he has now. He stands up, all these ideas running through his head at world’s fastest runner speed. “May, I’ll call you back.”

“What? Tony-“

He hangs up and rushes to get his suit.

A state park? Is she fucking kidding him? A state park an hour outside of New York City? Penny either made a super reckless decision or has been kidnapped and they disposed her phone in the middle of the woods! She’s not an ant-sized target, either. SpiderGirl has stopped many crimes and her affiliation to the Avengers puts a flaming red target on the back of her head. He tries not to think about it too often, but he’s forced to, now.

He arrives in twenty minutes, thank God for how fast the suit was. If it wasn’t, maybe he’s not able to prevent something he needs to. The whole time, he isn’t sure if he’s more blood-curled or more blood-boiled. If she was kidnapped, then one of his worst fears is here for him. If not, he couldn’t really believe it. Penny just ran away outside of the city to do what? Sit? Nothing made sense, the idea of her phone being disposed there felt more realistic, to him, than for her to just be sitting there in the woods in the dead of night.

Tony lands in a secluded area of the state park. Hopefully not too many people just saw Iron Man land in Bear Mountain State Park in the evening for a reason unknown to them. What he’s positive is Penny sits on a rock all alone brings even more disbelief than before to him. “Penny, why the hell are you in the middle of the woods at night-we were worried _sick_ about you!” Tony scolds, popping out of his suit and starts over in his gray lounge clothes.

Penny doesn’t turn around or dramatically, but he’s pretty sure she’s shaking. Heavily. Oh, God, he doesn’t want to scare her, he just wants her to explain why she’s here, he only wants her to be alright. “Penny? …Honey?”

Tony slowly walks to get in front of her. She won’t look up at him.

“Penny,” he tries, quiet, yet firm. “Penny, you can’t just go way outside the city at night alone without telling anybody. I know it’s been horrible lately, I know, but I can’t let anything happen to you, I wouldn’t know how to breathe right if something happened to you, ok?”

Penny breathes raggedly. “Ok.”

No fight? No protest? No nothing? And at that low volume? Tony kneels down in front of her and further softens his voice. “We can talk about whatever you want, if it’d help, ok? I’m not better than any therapist or May, but if you want my help, I’m here for you.”

“I don’t need your help, Mr. Stark, I’m ok,” Penny finally looks up, pushing a smile as weak as string with a puffy, trauma-stricken face.

She’s been crying. A lot. And very, very hard. It shatters his heart to see it when it gives him joy to see her smile. “I know you’re not ok, Penny, no one is always ok,” he softly explains.

“I’m fine,” she repeats.

Tony doesn’t want to argue with her, he just wants to get her home and then maybe he can help her. “Pen, it’s gonna be a bit late by the time we get back home, you want to get anything,” he takes her hands so he can help her up,”to eat…” he pauses and chuckles. “Did you jump in a freaking lake or something, kid, your arm is wet-“

His stomach plummets. Just like the stock market, but worse than the Great Depression.

Tony removes his hand from hers and looks in his. Blood.

He gasps and looks, trying to see where it’s coming from as Penny tries to pull away, but he grips her so that she’d have to try ten times harder to lose him. The blood isn’t coming from her palm and her other arm is dry. Tony pulls her left (his right) sleeve up.

There would be more blood, but it’d been soaked up by her shirt and cardigan.

Tony tears up immediately upon absorbing what Penny had done to herself, but having some fifty-year-old man crying in front of her wasn’t going to help. “Baby, we’ve gotta get you to the tower right now,” he tries to pull her to her feet.

“No, please, I don’t want to-“

“I’m not going to let you bleed out to death, I’m not going to let you cut yourself, anymore!” Tony says in a panic. There’s so much more blood than he’d expected. Her arm was totaled like a car, merely an expression of what was inside.

“I don’t wanna hurt anymore,” Penny murmurs, yanking away and resuming her crying. “I don’t wanna hurt anymore,” she repeats.

“Penny-“

“Leave me alone,” she whimpers, trying to scoot away, almost falling off the rock.

“Honey, you have to let me help you, I’m not gonna let you hurt anymore-“

“You can’t help me,” Penny says forcefully, continuing to bleed from her arm. “I can’t help anyone, I can’t help the Davis’, I can’t help M.J., I can’t help myself,” she sobs.

“Pen, look at me,” Tony tries to get her focus. “You’re bleeding out dangerously and if you lose too much blood, it’s going to get a lot worse.” He wasn’t going to tell her she was going to die or fall into a coma, that was no way to comfort a self-harming girl. Not Penny. He didn’t even really understand how much blood it was, anyways, because it was dark, but her sleeves were soaked in red. “It’s the hospital or the tower, but I know you rather go to the tower because you don’t want to be on record for self-harm at the hospital, right?”

Penny’s tears continue down her face, feeling more and more fatigued, not that she’d tell him that. Was she really bleeding that much? God, she’s cold. Very cold.

He doesn’t know what to do, so his eyes scan the landscape. Nothing here and no one here to help. Tony looks back at the bleeding girl in his arms. “ _Please_ stay here,” he begs her before getting up and getting back in his suit.

Once enclosed, he pauses. Tony doesn’t mean to, but the anxiety of seeing her hurt herself is there. How long has she been doing it? Was it just tonight? Was she skipping her medication? Did something happen that she’s never told him? All these questions, but he has to focus on keeping her conscious and alive. Are those the stakes? He quickly walks back over to her and kneels on the ground. “Pen, I don’t know how else to get you back to the city, I’m gonna have to carry you-“

“You’re crazy,” she gruffly whispers.

“Yeah, I know I am, but to find a car, somehow, and drive for an hour plus possible traffic would put you at a huge risk, I have to fly you back!”

Penny doesn’t respond, a million thoughts flourishing like haunting devils in her head. Now, she doesn’t know what she wants. She doesn’t want to hurt, anymore, she wants things to be good again. _She_ wants to be good again.

The arms of the suit scoop Penny’s body up, triggering the teen’s thoughts about the weight she’s gained and how uncomfortable this was making her. She wishes she could just curl up and never worry about anything ever again, but that was never going to be reality.

Tony slowly flies up into the air, making sure he’s carrying her in the absolute safest way possible. Dropping her would kill her immediately. “Friday, contact Bruce and Helen, tell them it’s an emergency!”

“No,” Penny’s voice is not audible over the noise of the suit thrusters. She doesn’t want two more people to know she’s cut her arm, much less two of her idols. “No…”

He starts out slow, not removing his eyes from Penny as he flies in the air. She’s pretty secure, but everything scares him, right now.

“Tony, what’s going on?” Bruce answers, finally.

“I need you and Helen to set up the medical bay, it’s Penny.” He pauses to think about if he needs to tell the whole story. They’re going to know, it’s obvious with the slashes on her arm being like tally marks on a chalkboard.

“Why, what happened?” Bruce’s voice went up a notch.

“It’s her arm, I’ll tell you when we get there, but I’m worried she’s losing a lot of blood. Get Helen, if you can, I need her, too!”

“Ok, so heavily bleeding arm, anything else?” Bruce mentally notes.

Tony looks for anything else. Her other arm was dry. People don’t really cut anywhere else. “She’s fatigued, I don’t know if it’s the blood loss or something else.”

“Got it. I’ll see you there.”

The world around her was continuously blurring. “I’m…sorry…” she tries. Her thoughts slur and slow. She’s tired, not going unconscious, but exhausted. It feels confusing and distorted. “I’m sorry I’m not good enough, I’m so sorry-“

“Penny, you were always more than enough- _always_.”

“I never was…”

A full diagnosis to the extent of what Friday could do shows up on Tony’s helmet screen. “Boss, Miss Parker’s heart rate is accelerated and is heavily fatigued-“

“Wow, I could never have guessed,” Tony irritably snaps.

“Her blood loss will not be fatal, but it is serious, especially with her smaller body and higher heart rate. Her wounds are vulnerable to infection and most likely to scar. I noticed she hasn’t been taking her prescribed depression medication, it doesn’t show up in her system.”

His stomach drops, once more. This could have happened regardless of whether she was taking her medicine, or not, but it was less likely if she had taken it.

Oh, God, Penny.

Twenty minutes there filled with fear and twenty minutes back filled with more fear.

Tony lands on the tower deck, Bruce and Helen both meeting him there with a stretcher (their version rather than the hospital kind).

Penny wants to crumble into deep slumber or unconsciousness, but she hasn’t, yet. Why is she awake? Does she need to be awake? Oh, God, no, not more people, they’re at the tower, she doesn’t want to see more people.

Bruce and Helen take Penny from Tony’s arms, scurrying away with her, away from his reach, away from _him_.

In all of his shock and hurt, he finally stops.

If she had died, a part of himself would’ve been gone.

Unknown to him when he first realized she had cut herself that horrifically, it wasn’t a possibility she would die, but to the man that loved her like a daughter, just thinking about it was enough to worry him of the possibility.

Worry. It started at worry, went to feeling sick in the stomach, and went to panic all in one night. Tony doesn’t notice it, but his hand is shaking discreetly. He wasn’t there for her when she needed him. But it’s not like she opened up. But he still wasn’t there.

His breaths are staggered as he un-pauses, continuing to the medical bay. When he got there, Penny had succumbed to unconsciousness as she was treated. The duo work tirelessly to stabilize her and to set up treatment. As Helen sets up a new medical tool that was supposed to speed up the healing process of wounds like these, Bruce looks back at Tony in horror. “Don’t tell me she’s done what I think she did.”

Tony can only look back at him with darkness in his brown orbs. What is he supposed to say?

“Hang in there, Penny, we got you,” Helen quietly urges as she works on the teenage girl. “Tony, where the hell did you find her?”

“She was an hour outside of the city alone,” he answers.

Helen looks bewildered. “Why so far from Queens?”

“Wish I knew,” Tony whispers. He looks down at Penny. The pain, even in lack of conscious, still lives in her face. This was going to be one of his biggest regrets. He could only see the pain in her face when it was too late.

He was just too late.

“Boss, you have five missed calls from May Parker,” Friday alerts, “as well as two text messages. To sum it up, she’s very worried.”

Worried. So much fucking worry in one night. Can’t it just stop?

Helen and Bruce both give him the look that tells him to go call May back and then go rest.

“I-“

“Go,” Helen tells him firmly.

He takes one last look at the girl who he loves like his own daughter and leaves the room to return the phone call to her aunt.

Talking on the phone with May was a nightmare. It wasn’t her fault, normal parents cried and would ask a billion questions when their niece (pretty-much daughter). In the moment, Tony silently decided to himself that he wasn’t going to tell May that Penny had been cutting. Not _yet_. Guilt coiled inside him for lying to her, but Tony thought that it was a discussion between Penny and her aunt. Deep down, scared to admit it, he just couldn’t figure out how to tell May that she’d been cutting.

May sniffles on the other side of the phone. “So she’ll be ok, right?”

“She’s going to be absolutely fine,” Tony steadily reassures her. “Penny’s tough and her super-healing factor will make it even better.”

“When can I pick her up, do you think?”

Tony pauses. Penny needs time. Just enough time to deal with one person at a time. It was ten at night, right now. “It’s late and not the safest place to be out at night. I’ll have Happy pick you up as soon as possible, ok?”

As Friday contacts Happy Hogan, May replies, “Alright. See you then.”

The phone is hung up and there is nothing but a man, the darkness, and the silence.

That is, until he plops down on the sofa and lies his head in his hands, about to let tears pour from his eyes.

Tony deeply exhales, attempting to let out his agony through his breaths, but that is historically proven to not work. She’s hurt and hurt _so_ much and he was never there to help her through. May did all she could, but Penny was a bit of a mastermind at keeping secrets. Example: SpiderGirl. It took a good while until she found that out.

The world and more weighs on his body. The moment his hand felt the blood and when he realized it replays in his brain over and over again, each time more agonizing than before. How long had she been bleeding there? How long had she been bleeding before he finally came to bring her home?

Why did he have to fail?

Friday chirps to life. “Boss, Miss Potts has-“

“Tony?”

The sound of clicking heels and his wife’s voice interrupts him more than his A.I. does. He looks up, seeing Pepper walk into the room. Told by how she was still in a Dior shift and hibiscus pink lipstick still on her lips, she only just got back from work, now. Busy day as a CEO. “Hey, Pep.”

She stops to yank her shoes off her feet, sighing in relief once her feet touch the icy floor. “You might wear platform shoes, sometimes, to be tall, but you still don’t know how it feels to wear pumps for eleven hours straight,” Pepper laughs, but that only lasts until she focuses her sight on her husband. “What’s wrong?”

“Hm?” Tony looks up as she stops in front of him and gives him a kiss.

“What’s wrong?” Pepper repeats before sitting down beside him, attention still on him intently.

He’s at a loss for words. Tony’s eyes are wide and unsure, trying to push the pain back and back into the deepest depths of him because God knew very well that he couldn’t get rid of it if he tried. “Penny…got hurt.”

“What?” Pepper’s voice rises in fear. “How-is she ok?”

“She’s down in the med bay, but probably doesn’t wanna see anyone for a while.” He felt bad not answering both questions, but his initial instinct was to beat around the bush.

“How’d she hurt her arm on patrol?” Pepper asks with the assumption that SpiderGirl was on patrol. Penny hadn’t been coming by, lately, but it was a pretty low likelihood that she broke her arm at home, or something, and that May took her here rather than the hospital since it was a non super-heroine injury.

Tony leaves a lingering in the air rather than an answer. That is, until, Pepper softly presses once more. Finally, with the will to let his lips open to speak, he says at a broken mouse’s whisper, “She didn’t get hurt on patrol.”

Pepper gets the sense that this wasn’t an accident at home and if it wasn’t on patrol…Someone randomly hurt her? “Tony?”

“She was cutting herself.”

Pepper’s stomach develops a sick, curling feeling rooting inside of her. Penny hasn’t had the easiest life and _did_ struggle with loss, depression, and juggling everything in the world…but it still stunned her.

Before his wife can speak again, he starts to explain more. “She ran away to a state park outside of the city and when I found her, I didn’t realize she was bleeding…” he starts with horrifying gravity until the hurt inside him roars through the sudden cracking of his voice, “it wasn’t…” he stops to recollect himself, “until I felt her sleeve that I realized it wasn’t wet from water, it was all the blood her sleeves soaked up.”

She feels chilled from head to toe and nearly shudders. Pepper hears the guilt in him, he had the most massive guilt complex of anyone she knew. “Tony, it wasn’t your fault-“

“I wasn’t there when she needed me,” he says with force, his eyes burning. But then his voice falls back to the quietness. “I _wasn’t_ there. As someone who’s gone through trauma and depression time and time again, you think I’d see the signs and it turns out I’m just as fucking bad as a person as everyone else-“

“You didn’t see her for two weeks,” Pepper tries calmly, taking his rough, dry hand into her soft, light one.

“I called, I texted, I didn’t want to overbearbutifIdidIcould’vestoppedher-“

“There was _nothing_ you could’ve done, you did what you could.”

That wasn’t true. Tony knew that wasn’t true, if he’d just been better, if he tried harder to reach her, maybe she wouldn’t be in this place, right now. This hole of misery and ebony darkness. He had felt it before and to watch the girl that was like his daughter feel it, too, was a million times worse than the pain just on his own shoulders. “If she even feels a fraction of what I’ve felt in my life,” Tony shakes his head slowly.

But the moment he remembers she’s felt the loss, the guilt, and more, tears return to his eyes. “…Pepper, she’s at risk.”

Pepper rubs her hand up and down Tony’s back lightly with love. “Penny’s such a strong girl. Much stronger than kids at her age I knew. Definitely stronger than I was at her age, too. We’re gonna help her get through this. You, May, her friends, me.”

Tony slides his hands over his face. “Damage’s already been done.”

Pepper hesitates to say what she intends to, for a couple of seconds. “But she’s still here.”

The thought of Penny _not_ being here was unbearable.

Steadily, he exhales, determination trying to overshadow his own devils inside of him. “I’ll do whatever it takes to help her.”

“I know you will. That’s what a good father does.”

Tony looks at her as if he’s about to debate him being a father, but no words leave his mouth. What he’s always done for her was what a father would do. All the good things he’s ever tried to do, alongside the things he thought he did at least okay at.

There was nothing to debate.

* * *

She might be awake, but she just wants to go back to sleep.

Between the magnificent Helen Cho, the amazing Bruce Banner, and her own super-healing factor, Penny’s wounds were healing relatively well. No more bleeding and the stinging is gone. Her skin’s repaired itself enough to not let air or bacteria in, but not enough to take away the scabs and the scars. It was absolutely going to leave permanent scars. Her arm would never look the same again.

Considering how her body was trying to heal herself as fast as it could with no stop, they had to give her melatonin in attempt to get her to sleep. Her body needed to rest which it could thanks to Cho’s technology that heavily supplemented her healing.

God, she was thirsty. It didn’t really matter…right? What did matter? Her arm? At this point, Penny didn’t know even though she thought she did.

She feels dry. Dry as if the inner moisture of a cactus was sucked out of her. Dehydrated of stability, of accomplished dreams, of the will to smile. When you are dry for too long, all things inevitably cracked.

Penny supposed that, on top of cracking, that she entirely broke.

“I see you’re awake.”

Helen’s voice is strangely angelic, but with that tinge of mourning that keeps Penny from relief. She can’t even look towards the woman’s direction because her mind is drowned in poisonous shame.

Helen, tired but very motivated to make sure her patient is stable, continues on. “You’re very lucky you aren’t the average child. Your healing factor on top of the machine makes it possible that…your scars may mostly heal.”

Mostly heal? Really? Penny wasn’t sure if it was possible, but she didn’t care about scars or aftermath when she created the wounds.

The black-haired doctor calmly breathes out. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, Penny. You don’t have to tell me the things you’d tell your therapist, you don’t have to tell me your deepest secrets, you don’t have to pour yourself out to me if it scares you. Whether you share more or less with me is alright…But I want to help you. It could start with reviewing your medications, your routines, and basic things. If you don’t want my help, it’s ok, maybe I’m not the best person to help you…Getting help starts with you.”

Penny’s attention span is zoning, but she’s still trying to listen to Helen. It was only respectful.

Helen sits down on the stool behind her, pausing before she spoke. “My father died when I was sixteen. At the time, I had just come over to America with my family for high school and when he died, a piece of me was lost. I completely spiraled. Down and down and down,” she reminisces. “By my junior year, I doubted if living on this beautiful Earth was worth it anymore…But I was wrong. I accomplished my dreams and was able to become so much happier than seventeen-year-old me could ever have imagined. I brought myself out of the cave to feel the sun again,” Helen smiles ethereally with a glow in her face. “But I didn’t have much help. I went on my journey alone. You don’t have to do that at all. There are people that love you beyond belief and will support you no matter what. When you’re broken, your family is your crutch.”

Penny, still lying flat in the medical bed, tries to suppress tears from rising to her eyes. _Will they_ _?_ She asks internally. _Will they really be there?_

Helen offers her hand to the teenage girl in front of her and to her surprise, Penny takes it. “We both lost our fathers. You lost a second father. I may never be able to have mine, again…but you still have the one right in front of you.”

Penny’s jaw untenses just a smidge at the words of the doctor in front of her, never having imagined her early life to be filled with pain at that magnitude. Her hand that’s not in Helen’s fidgets under the covers nervously, guilt growing cold and intense in her mind. Father right in front of her…Tony.

Helen releases her hand from the teen’s. “Penny, I’d never seen Tony shaken the way he was, tonight. All I had to do was look in his eyes and I understood. He _loves_ you.”

God, she felt like bawling like a baby. Those tears she tried so hard to prevent rose to her eyes, anyways, now just trying to not let her face heat up and distort. Why the hell should her lifelong idol love some nerdy girl from Queens like her?

“Your aunt _loves_ you. Pepper, M.J., Ned, and the team all love you. There’s practically nothing they wouldn’t do for you. Penny, I promise you that you can feel the wonderful light again that you haven’t felt in a long time. And on the way to that light, there’s hands you can hold to help you get there.”

“Are you sure?” Penny blurts in a whisper with that treasured, tiny star of hope in her voice, begging that the woman’s answer wouldn’t let that star go out.

“Oh, Penny, I’m more than sure,” Helen reassures. “There’s quite a few loving hands, sweetheart.”

May. Tony. Pepper. Ned…maybe even M.J. Maybe Ben’s ghost. Maybe her parents’ ghostly hands, too, from heaven above.

An alarm goes off. Not a raucous, startling one, but the iPhone marimba tone. Helen stands up. “I made you a bowl of cinnamon oatmeal, if you’re hungry. If not, I’ll eat it, but it was Bruce’s idea. He thought it’d be healthy, but delicious enough to be appetizing. Meanwhile, I’m the doctor who just recommended a bowl of Lucky Charms.”

Penny can’t help but giggle at the woman’s sense of humor. When she’s done giggling, she’s filled with warmth over Bruce and Helen’s care for her. As she returned to consciousness, she feared scolding or insensitivity, whether she anticipated it or not. This was the best reaction she could have asked for.

Now alone, she sits in silence. Penny’s eyes can’t help but stare at her arm. There’s not tons of regret or none. There’s only feelings of discomfort that she brought herself to this position of attention. Anyone around her could try to wipe away the guilt complex she’s had rooted deep inside her like the oldest oak tree on Earth, but it won’t work. Not in the slightest.

She holds her arm. Just some time ago, she froze in the New York state night and was losing enough blood that her sleeve was drenched. Now, she’s less cold and scarred and is gonna be fed oatmeal.

What Helen said about Mr. Stark…Penny can’t imagine. She can’t imagine that he hurt _that_ much, but she also can’t imagine how he felt with the hurt he had. It was her fault, she should have gotten rid of the glass as soon as she found it, but what difference would it make when if it wasn’t a glass shard, it could have simply been a kitchen knife? A dagger from the weaponry? With the will to hurt yourself, anything is a weapon. As her mind expands, Penny finds herself doing something unexpected: she stopped herself. The spiral. She didn’t go down the spiral. She turned the other way.

Could she actually help herself? Penny was weak, battered, bruised, and obviously injured. She failed…but Helen just opened her mind and told her there is a second chance waiting for her. A second chance to become maybe not the person she was before, but the person she wants to be.

As Penny begins to believe maybe there’s something she can do, she smiles, even if it is soft and small.

* * *

He finds the will to go downstairs.

Tony doesn’t know what she’s doing. Is she asleep? Is she awake? Is she looking for something to cut with, crying her heart out, or both? Fear makes up his inner storm and he’s braving it as he walks down the hall.

When he finally reaches the door, he peers through the glass with caution. Feet away, Penny is conscious, sitting on the bed in Indian pose eating something from a bowl. She looks better but looks are incredibly and notoriously deceiving.

Tony breathes out through slightly opened lips and turns the doorknob.

When that happens, Penny stops eating her food and pauses in petrification. Her crystal eyes are frozen and glued to him, even though all she wants to do is to _not_ look at him. The oatmeal was actually pretty delicious (cinnamon, honey, and berries served as great toppings), but not enough to save her from instinct and fear.

He doesn’t know what to say to her. Tony’s mind tries to search for answers as he steps inside and closes the door behind him. What do people usually do in these situations? All he knew was that he wanted to help her and make her happy. But what else? How does he make it happen? “You ok?” he asks with a minor shake in his voice.

His words, though expected, are startling to Penny. “I’m good,” she answers quietly. Penny was, in fact, not good, but she _was_ better than before. An improvement. Baby steps, she supposed.

Tony tries to keep his eyes off her arm, but it’s hard to help. It’s so unrecognizable. The only recognizable part from her wrist to elbow would be if she turned her arm over where her skin was light and faintly showed veins rather than thick, red, scabby scars.

Discomfort jumps in Penny and she quickly pulls the blanket over her arm.

In pain, Tony sighs and continues over to her. Penny scoots over and lets him sit down on the bed beside her. He’s hesitant, but he takes her right hand lightly into his. “…What’s been going on?”

Penny looks away. “You don’t want to know.”

“I wasn’t there for you before. I want to be there now.”

The guilt in his voice makes Penny’s stomach almost flip over on top of the softness in his brown eyes. How much he cares hurts her. It hurts because it’s never sunk into her mind until now. Helen’s words and the way he was, right now, finally broke the barrier. It didn’t really make sense to her, it just left her confused.

“You were hurting yourself tonight, Pen, so please don’t tell me it’s nothing.”

His change of tone gave Penny a shudder she tried and failed to suppress. It was desperate and pleading, putting pressure on her.

“God, I’m sorry. I don’t want to scare you-I’m scared,” he quickly apologizes and removes his hand. “…I’m scared for you, Penny,” Tony whispers.

Penny didn’t realize that his hand was comforting until it was gone, but she tries not to show it. She breathes in and holds her breath. “I was rejected from M.I.T.”

For Tony, disappointment was the farthest thing from what he felt, but he knew that’s what Penny was thinking he felt. But this was one of her biggest dreams. He remembers how nervous she was, but how much confidence she had worked up over time. He remembers the day she came downstairs and was dressed in a peony pink suit and a pair Tory Burch flats Pepper had gifted her, smelling like Jo Malone red roses, too. It was for her interview and she was gleeful and ready. Her happiness made him happy. But to see her now…oh, how much pain the contrast brought him was indescribable.

Penny is unable to look at him while she says it. “And Columbia.”

“Pen, you know I’m proud of you no matter where you go to school, right?”

Proud? She doesn’t understand. “But I’m your intern…it’s kinda part of your legacy that the people around you go to Ivy Leagues.”

“Oh, honey, No,” Tony shakes his head. “It’s not your job to worry about my legacy, that’s stupid. It’s your job to worry about you. Whether you went to M.I.T. or to community college, I will always be proud of you because you’re just _brilliant_.”

Penny feels stunned and almost ashamed, in a way. She was so worried and, yet, he had this much pride and care for her? It was confusing and comforting all at once and that, too, was confusing.

“And you are _loved_.”

She doesn’t know what to say or how to react. When you looked at her, gears were spinning in her head and question marks appeared around her eyes.

“Penny, if you felt like you had to get into the very best school possible because of me or May or society, then I failed you. You never had to get into a particular school for someone else. You only had to do it for you.”

She nods and readjusts her position to lie her legs flat out on the bed. “It was still my dream school, though. I wasn’t good enough.”

Tony doesn’t understand in the slightest how they could NOT accept her, but he isn’t going to say that aloud. The same about Columbia. But she applied to other schools, the rest were going to admit her.

“It’s just that,” Penny opens up, “…that I didn’t know what I was gonna do if I didn’t go down the path that I thought I should go down. I don’t know what I wanna do yet and I don’t know if I’m ready.”

Tony pauses to think. “Have you ever thought about taking a gap year?”

Penny’s interest is piqued. “No…why?”

“Well, when I was growing up, it was mostly just rich kids from England who did them, supposedly. But, now, I hear about kids backpacking countries and volunteering and all sorts of stuff during a gap year. Some schools actually _like_ when they take a gap year, but I think that’s just for weird admissions stuff.”

“They just…travel?”

“Mostly travel, but it can be anything, really. Travel, teach, learn, get a job, have fun. They do productive stuff, even if it’s not school. It’s supposed to help kids figure out what they want to do and grow in non-academic ways.”

Penny weakly smiles at the thought of learning more Spanish, or going to the beach, or staying in hostels and seeing a bit of the world. “It sounds fun, but probably expensive.”

“I’d fund it,” Tony declares immediately.

“Mm I’m not just gonna allow you to pay for everything in my life, you know that, right?”

“I can’t hear you over the sounds of kangaroos calling your name. That’s where you’ve always wanted to go, right? Australia?”

Images of the ocean, the Opera House, and the Daintree Rainforest appear in Penny’s mind. “Airfare is over one thousand dollars per person minimum-“

“Penny, Pepper can spend that on shoes and I can spend that on a single starch shirt.”

“That’s terrifying.”

“We pay for quality but I will admit that, sometimes, some of this stuff is obnoxiously overpriced.”

Penny giggles and nods at his perspective, shifting her body, once again.

The teenage girl laughing brings unimaginable relief to Tony. At least he could get her to laugh. She needed that in her life. He needed it, too, because then maybe he wouldn’t focus on her arm and the pain so much.

“It sounds fun…but I don’t think I’ll do it.”

“Kinda something you have to think about. Benefits and negatives,” Tony suggests with a mild shrug. “Where else did you apply to?” he changes the subject.

“Cal Institute of Technology, Cal Polytech, Fordham, USC, NYU, Northwestern, UCLA, Manhattan Community College as a backup, and Pomona College.”

That was a lot of schools. A _lot_. “…So California or New York?”

“And Illinois.”

“Variety.”

“Yes, I have a very diverse pool.”

“Yeah, I didn’t expect you to look at UCF, or something-I never anticipated that school getting so popular.”

Penny hums. “I honestly never looked…I looked at New York so much because I thought it’d make May happier. Also, maybe I could just live at home if I commuted to Columbia or Fordham or NYU instead of paying tons of money to live not too far away from my aunt,” she explains.

“Then why all the Cali schools?”

“Well, it’s a little bit sunnier there, to be honest.”

“I can see why that appeals.”

“Plus, I like all the national parks. I’m gonna visit them all as soon as I visit, one day.” She imagines Yosemite to be the best of them all with the Channel Islands to be a close second or even a tie.

“You should’ve just asked me to take you over last spring break. Could’ve taken you to Lake Tahoe and stuff,” Tony suggests.

Penny gives him a quizzical and intensely judgmental look. “Mr. Stark, you know that Lake Tahoe is _not_ a national park, right?”

“…Shit, you’re right.”

She was in disbelief. “I really really wish I gotten that on video,” Penny bursts into a smirk.

“No-“

“Like, really really _really_ wish-“

“Friday, you’re gonna never speak of this moment, you understand me?” Tony demands of the A.I.

“Understood, Boss,” the Irish A.I. answers.

“Dammit,” Penny murmurs.

“Lang-you know, it’s useless at this point, especially when you hang around me…Kid, isn’t your food gonna get cold?”

“Hm? OH!” Penny yelps, immediately grabbing the bowl and resuming to eat. Her scarred arm comes into view, once more.

As the teen girl in front of him mentions how good of oatmeal Dr. Banner made, Tony can’t help but focus on her arm. He can’t help but wonder if there’s more scars on her body he can’t see. Legs? Ankles? Upper arm? Helen and Bruce saw them if they existed, right?

Just as things were getting better, Penny feels the shame, again as his attention isn’t even on her last words. It stings, but can she blame him? Look what she did to herself! But at the same time, Penny didn’t know if she regretted it, or not. She only regretted being caught. But then, she wouldn’t be talking to him or have talked to Helen. She needed to hear their words. They meant more than even she understood.

He tries to be gentle. She needs gentle and he won’t let himself hurt her. “You haven’t been taking your meds.”

Penny looks down at the blankets. “I keep forgetting.”

Tony’s about to debunk her lie, but she continues, part of her mind deciding actively to open up and the other half letting it simply slip. “I’m so blurred and unable to make the time for all these things. I can’t get into M.I.T. without the grades, I can’t give M.J. the love she deserves without being there for her, I can’t stay small without picking up the salads and not snack so much, I can’t help May manage the apartment and just life without cleaning up and doing chores. It all adds up and I’m at the bottom of the list.”

Wait, staying small? When was that a concern? He guessed being a teenage girl automatically made it a concern, these days. “You can’t take care of anyone else before taking care of yourself, Pen.”

“But people need me-“ Penny tries.

“They need you happy and healthy because they care about you…Penny, you don’t have to be a hero in all aspects of life. _You_ come first, not SpiderGirl or what you can give to others.”

What he says shakes Penny and she flusters further. “But SpiderGirl is more important than me,” she blurts.

Tony takes her hand, once more, and speaks to her the most directly he has in the conversation. “There is no SpiderGirl without Penny Parker. And without Penny Parker, the world is a blander place.”

Penny, with all her strength, tries to repress the tears that want to come to her eyes. The volume of emotion is so much and it’s hard to handle.

“Also, maybe I’m not a nutritionist, but only salad and no snacking doesn’t really suit your super-kid metabolism, Pen,” Tony mentions.

“Salad’s good for you,” Penny weakly argues, still trying to make the urge to cry go away.

“Only if you make it right. A bowl of leaves doesn’t sound that appetizing, to be honest,” Tony playfully admits.

Penny shrugs it off, taking the last few bites of her oatmeal drinks a long gulp of water.

There’s a knock at the door and as Tony turns around, Bruce comes through the door. “Hey, Pen. Get enough to eat?”

“Yeah, this was good, Dr. Banner, thank you,” Penny nods with the empty bowl in front of her, then putting it on the side table.

Bruce’s mannerisms are nervous and a bit meek, which is usual for him, but the circumstances make it worse. “You can leave tonight, if you want, but Helen and I’d prefer to keep you overnight for another session of treatment on your arm. We might be able to heal it completely with enough treatment sessions over time,” he explains.

Penny nods in understanding, feeling consciously aware of her arm. The arm’s injuries she created.

“And your aunt is gonna be here soon.”

Tony gives him a look to not say anything about her aunt as Penny looks visibly distressed, but trying to keep her cool.

Bruce immediately gets the memo. “Well, not that soon. We’ll see. Meanwhile, you can just chill around the tower…but we don’t want you alone.”

“Dr. Banner, I-“

“Penny, I speak from experience, you’re going to want to try again,” Bruce cuts her off a bit sharply. “…Just for tonight. You can hang around with Tony or May or whoever, but you need to be distracted and engaged with something and or someone so your brain doesn’t go dark,” he explains in a quieter and less forceful tone.

He’s right and she knows it. All Penny can do is nod before getting up out of bed, realizing she’s still in the same clothes as she bled in hours ago in the New York cold.

“Pepper has comfy pajamas, Pen, she’ll be happy to get you a pair,” Tony offers.

She’s not Pepper’s size, anymore. Every little carb added up. “No, that’s ok, Mr. Stark-“

“Sleeping in jeans is probably not that comfortable, Pen. But maybe May thought to bring a pair,” Bruce says.

“We’ll see.” Tony remembers that Penny has stood up to, presumably, go somewhere. “Wanna just go watch tv?”

What else was there to do that wasn’t snuggling deep down in bed and refusing to wake up? “Yeah, that sounds good,” Penny accepts.

The living room is hauntingly dark when they arrive, but Friday dims the lights and, for Penny, it felt warm, cozy, and calm. The A.I. turns the tv on, but at a brightness appropriate to match the room rather than blaring blue-white light attacking her eyes.

Penny sits down on the sofa, initially afraid to lie back and get comfortable, but she succumbs to her own weakness for the comfies and leans back into the plush sofa cushions.

Tony looks at Penny with concern. “I’m gonna go see if Pepper has a good pair of pajamas you can wear…” he says. “…Please don’t try again,” he whispers with heartbreak.

“I won’t. Friday would tell you, anyways.”

She wasn’t wrong. With caution gobbling his brain, Tony leaves the room swiftly for his and Pepper’s floor of the tower.

Everything feels different for Penny. It was noisy Queens, icy Bear Mountain, and now loving Stark Tower. Everything happened so fast and it happened so fast that she couldn’t remember every feeling inside of her and it hurt just as much as the pain itself. Penny feels her left arm and inhales, trying her very best to not cry. Not now. Not more tears. She didn’t want more tears, right now. She didn’t want to hurt, no more hurting.

The tv talks about senators and the economy and how the country is going to end up in civil war for the second time. The world seems like it’s going to come apart any second, so she snatches the tv remote and changes the channel.

Another news network.

“Fri, put on Netflix.”

Immediately, the a.i. let the screen go to black and was replaced by the notable Netflix opening before going to the home screen.

Penny turns the volume down since the cable and Netflix noise level wasn’t equivalent. It immediately plays a trailer for The Old Guard, but she wasn’t interested in watching that. In fact, she didn’t know what she wanted to watch. Penny doesn’t register it, until now, but the reason it was so dark was because the windows had their shading settings on. Well, now, she just feels dumb.

Penny’s out of ideas and has no clue of what to do. Her aunt was coming, and she was going to have to explain to her everything, all probably while watching her cry. She already cried enough, for the two of them. Penny didn’t want to see more tears.

Her on-and-off switch emotions were extraordinarily difficult. Stability was a myth. A painfully old, outdated myth. As she leaned over, Penny was made aware of her rolling stomach, making her lean back into the sofa and pull her knees to her chest. Still, she is cold, even after lying in bed. Wait…what time was it?

“I’m gonna grab a snack, you think she wants gummy bears?”

Penny turns around. It’s Tony talking to Pepper at the edge of the kitchen quietly. The redhead is in silk pajamas with a glowing face (probably six hundred dollars of skincare absorbed into her skin) and her opposite looks stressed and a bit on-edge. Not the obvious stressed, but the “I’m trying my best here, nothing’s wrong, fuck off,” stressed out. Sometimes it made her laugh, just a bit, but now that it’s all about her, there’s no laughter to have.

“No, she likes oreos better, if I remember correctly. Wasn’t the oatmeal already sugary, though? Don’t put her on sweet overload, honey,” Pepper lightly scolds.

“I’m just trying to cheer her up and help normalize things,” Tony rebuts.

After that, Penny’s mind strays away into her own cycle of thinking. He’s trying too hard, he doesn’t have to do that, she doesn’t deserve his care, anyways. And Pepper shouldn’t care, either, much less giver her a pair of her pricy pajamas. Why all this fussing and so much caring-why so much love?

As soon as she blinks, her thoughts are cut off by Tony coming back over with a bowl of oreos and a heavy weighted blanket. He sets the oreos on the coffee table and gives Penny the 25-pound blanket. “Weighted blankets are all the rage, lately. A bit expensive, too, for blankets with tons of clay beads in them…I bought 10.”

Penny playfully shakes her head. She had one at the apartment, but not here. This one was heavier and extra luxurious, too. “Thank you, this is really nice,” she thanks sincerely.

“Hey, Penny,” Pepper walks over, now in UGG slippers rather than pumps. “I thought you might like one of these. I had no idea what size you were, so I just got a medium,” she hands the teenage girl a trio of pajamas.

“Oh…” Penny is surprised. One set is ash gray with a stretchy jersey-knit material, another pale blue luxurious silk, and a third is a black-white stripe flannel set . “Miss Stark, thank you, these are really nice, but I’m gonna be going home, soon-“

“Bruce wasn’t going to insist because he’s polite like that, but he wanted you to stay overnight,” Tony interrupts her softly.

No. Penny wanted to say that she’s ok now, she’s not hurting herself, she’s not going to do anything, but those words don’t come out. Her mouth stays shut and she nods before looking more into the pajamas, trying to push the subject away. When she sees the size tags on all of them, Penny doesn’t mean to, but she frowns.

“Something wrong? A tag still on them?” Pepper asks upon seeing the teen’s face.

Penny is unsure of how to explain it. It was as exceedingly uncomfortable. Tony was generally fit and Pepper was a tall, slender goddess. “These won’t fit me,” she says meekly, practically bracing for the reaction.

“Oh, I have larges and extra larges,” Pepper replies casually.

What? Really? But she doesn’t wear those sizes. The CEO has left Penny confused, but almost comforted and relieved, as well.

“Which one you prefer? I think I have four larges and three extra larges, if I’m remembering right.”

“Large?” Penny nervously answers, unable to retain eye contact with the generous redhead.

“Gotcha. I think I have just the thing.” And with that, Pepper is handed back the selection of pajamas and returned to her closet.

Penny looks down at the oreos. They weren’t just oreos: they were a big amount them.

Tony picks up on what she’s thinking, quickly. Once she mentioned the salad-no-snacking diet, he learned some of the gist. “We can split it, if you want,” he offers casually.

“I’ll see…”

The billionaire hands her the remote. “Something you wanna watch?”

Penny’s left blank and feeling small. “I don’t know.”

Tony hands the teen the remote. “You’re welcome to look.”

The first place she goes is the watchlist. A lot of stuff on his watchlist was stuff they both agreed on watching together whenever. Penny spots Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Crown, She-Ra: Princesses Of Power, and The Good Place, initially. But then, she stops at a movie she’s been meaning to watch, for a while. “What about this one?”

“I have no idea how to read Hindi, Gujarati, or whatever Indian language that is, but the description makes it sound good,” Tony shrugs.

Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga was a two-hour long Bollywood movie about a girl growing up unattracted to men in a homophobic Indian environment. Penny watched the trailer, one day, and was going to watch it before she remembered her test was tomorrow and immediately abandoned Netflix for every bit of studying material she had for it. But now, she can watch it like intended for two months. “That’s why captions exist,” Penny says before playing the movie.

Ten minutes in, Pepper returns with pajamas that did fit her and she was grateful for them. It was stretchy and cozy in its blueberry hue. Fifteen minutes after the movie starts, Penny can’t take it anymore. She’s still cold and has been cold for a while, her skin feeling like ice. And if she was covered up, maybe she would forget that she ever had cut herself that seriously. Slash after slash after slash.

_“Baby, we’ve gotta get you to the tower right now.”_

The line stings, even hours after. It was soft, yet on the verge of panic, yet severe…It was Ben. And she missed Ben more than anything in the world.

She remembers how she argued, she remembered how fatigue had set in on her, she remembers how she rocked back in forth alone in the state park woods for half an hour before he arrived. The half an hour, though, was really two hours in her head.

Further back, Penny remembers the pastries she’d bake with Ben, the stories he’d read to her as a little girl, how he helped her with her homework and comforted her when she cried. His laugh was contagious, and he was smart as hell. But one day, he was there and the next, he was gone.

She can feel how hard she cried April thirteenth of two-thousand-fifteen.

She remembers how it felt like when he died, he took a piece of her soul with her.

“Honey?”

“What?” Penny blinks confused. She didn’t realize she had leaned over and she definitely didn’t realize how her face was in a deep frown, unlike two minutes ago watching the movie.

Tony’s brown eyes are deep and considerate. “You ok?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Penny assures instantly like the answer to a Discord command.

He doesn’t want to press, so he leaves her be. But she looks stiff and rigid. All these changes, he should write them down to keep track. But, fuck, that’s probably how Pepper feels about him, sometimes, so he retracts that thought seconds after.

She bites into an oreo cookie, eyes glued back to the screen because looking at the person beside her would hurt too much. Accepting all of his attention and care was too much like Ben-it was too much like her father was said to have been like!

Penny wanted them more than anything…but like Helen said, she still had the father right in front of her. But he wasn’t her father, her uncle, or even a family friend! He was Tony Stark, the first superhero of the modern years, a genius beyond genius, iconic in all forms. Nothing made sense, not even her knowing him or being SpiderGirl made sense to her anymore…but did it ever make sense to her, in the first place?

Shit. She forgot to pull the blanket over her body.

The blanket is heavy and as soon as it sits over her body up to her neck, something changes in her body and mind. Is this a serotonin rush, or something? It’s cuddly, warming, and loving. Supposedly, these are supposed to replicate a person’s weight from a hug, but Penny knows all too well that no inanimate object can replace a hug.

“Comfy, right?” Tony smiles. “Pepper thought it’d be good for the anxiety, but I think it’s good just to use for everything.”

Penny softly chuckles, nodding in agreement before she feeds herself another oreo. These stupid cookies are so good…but the sugar…

She tries to not eat any more. Maybe she can, maybe she can’t, but Penny thought she could at least try.

It’s not finished for another hour, but Penny loves the movie. It reminds her of figuring out her bisexuality in her earlier teens and how afraid she was. She was mostly confident in her own skin, but the words she read on the screen sent her back in time to her first crush on a girl and her first on a guy.

Images of her girlfriend-no, _ex_ -girlfriend appear in her mind. M.J. was quirky, beautiful inside and out, too smart for her own good, and the girl she still loved. But they weren’t working. The relationship didn’t work like it once did. Both of their paths strayed with the weight of school, SpiderGirl, M.J.’s first job, and the world changing around them. Penny’s mental health had been tumbling down a tall hill and her girlfriend’s was too, Penny’s apart of it.

It was M.J.’s idea to break up. Penny had spent all the time and given the most love she could, she held on for as long as she could, but it was, inevitably, not enough.

It was silly, but Penny hadn’t looked at her phone because of the wallpaper. The wallpaper of them having a romantic picture in Central Park on a fall morning. M.J. had her hands on Penny’s hips and they leaned so their noses and foreheads pressed together, Penny unable to stop herself from laughing. Better yet, a golden retriever could be seen in the background. A complete accident, but a happy one.

It was one of her favorite pictures ever taken, but now the reason it was taken was gone.

From close friends to lovers and now…nothing. Friends? There’s only an awkward air left as the ashes of a wonderful kingdom burned down from within. The more Penny thinks about it and hears M.J.’s words in her head, the more her attention leaves the movie and goes to the girl she still loves.

That is, until, it’s interrupted. And it’s not Tony, this time.

Penny hears her name being mentioned in a sentence and when she looks up, she’s terrified. When her brain processes the woman’s words, it was Natasha Romanoff saying hi to her and how she didn’t realize the teen was there.

Really? Another person he had to lie to? But then, again, it was Natasha. She’d figure it out probably as soon as he told her, but it was for Penny’s sake that he did. “She decided to come over to work on some stuff and we’re just watching a movie. What’ch’you been up to?”

“Just doing stuff,” Nat says nonchalantly.

Penny half expects Clint to come out and say, “I’m stuff,” but she tries to pack that thought into the deepest depths of her mind.

“I was just grabbing a drink before I went to bed,” Nat continues to the kitchen. “You need anything while I’m up, guys?” she inquires as she opens the fridge and grabs a bottle of water.

“Coke, please? Want anything, Pen?”

Oh, yeah, Penny didn’t have a drink and her mouth felt dry in every corner. “A water, please?” she means to ask at a normal volume, but ends up sounding weak. Great.

Natasha brings the duo their drinks and even as her water is handed to her, all Penny can think about is the shot in the arm Nat received trying to help her save the Davis’ life. It’s making her drown in her own storm surge of poisonous regret and intoxicating pain.

“The arm doing ok?” Tony asks casually before Penny even thought about it.

“I don’t even think about it. The scar’s just kinda there now. Nothing concealer can’t cover up if I care enough, but I don’t.” Natasha then looks over to Penny. “It’s still not your fault, kid. You know that, right?”

Not her fault? What the fuck was she talking about? That’s what Penny wants to say, but has no bravery to say so. Hell, she doesn’t even know _what_ to say.

Natasha sets her drink down, just for a moment, to stretch her arms out. “Game night still on tomorrow?” she asks Tony.

“Think so. As long as _Thor_ understands Monopoly, this time,” Tony refers to the last time they played the game and the God of Thunder didn’t quite understand it, yet.

“It’s usually a team thing, Pen, but we’d love to have you, Ned, and-“ Natasha then remembers that the two weren’t a thing anymore, “whoever else,” she hopes she saved herself smoothly, enough.

“Thanks, Miss Romanoff, but I have a lot of schoolwork to finish up,” Penny thanks her for the offer, even though it hurts to reject it.

“Honestly, you probably learn more about economics and strategy in a board game than in class, so just remember that, ok?” Natasha smirks before starting towards the elevator to go to her floor. “I’ll see y’all.”

Knowing how sensitive she was to Natasha’s injury (more than her own), Tony monitor’s Penny’s external emotions carefully. “You ok?”

He’s asked that so many times that any line of string that hadn’t been snipped was cut and burned. “I’ve _been_ ok, Mr. Stark,” Penny’s eyes burn as she speaks, some of the blanket falling off her with the sudden straightening of her spine. “I’ve been just fine until I was followed to Bear Mountain!” she blurts with the worst tone possible. If she wanted to correct her words, she was doomed. They couldn’t be corrected.

Tony’s caught off guard. “If you were fine, you wouldn’t have been in a state park an hour from Manhattan hurting yourself with a shard of glass that I don’t know where it came from! I thought you’d been kidnapped and they disposed of your phone-I was _terrified_!”

The escalation of Tony brought by her own mistake shook her, sending shockwaves of tension and fear through her body. “You had _nothing_ to be terrified of-“ she says shakily, but with a newly created fire inside of her.

“No, you just gave me something ten times worse to be terrified of and I wasn’t there to help you-“

One tear, two tear down her face, it’s not noticed by Penny, only the wildfire of agony. “I didn’t need your help, I needed to…”

“What?” Tony doesn’t know what she was going to say and that in itself was terrifying. “Pen, you needed to what?!”

“I don’t know-I guess I needed to hurt more!” Penny yells. “I don’t…” she breathes out becoming breathless, looking around because she can’t look at the man beside her. Anxiety rises up from the storm surge and overtakes her.

She jumps up and heads down a hallway.

Nonono, where is she going? Please don’t do anything, God, please don’t do anything. With one of the worst feelings he’s felt ever, Tony knows he’s really fucked up now. “Penny!”

Room, bathroom, room, that’s the only thing Penny’s mind can really conjure. Anxiety keeps increasing and increasing, she can’t breathe as stable, everything’s going wrong again, no, not again, no more of this, why can’t it go away?

Penny finds a bathroom and locks the door behind her with Tony on her trail, crumbling to the floor and curling into a ball. Crying ensues just as soon as she curls into the tightest human ball possible, panic flowing through her veins with electric cackles, her own mind is her own greatest enemy and it’s begun it’s brutal attack.

“Penny?” Tony stands at the door on the other side. “Penny, please let me in!”

“No…” Penny whispers. “No, please, no!”

“Pen-“

That’s all that she hears before further descending into the battle against herself. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry,” she whimpers like a broken record, crunching her bones tighter and tighter until they might just break if she keeps trying. “Tony, I’m so sorry…”

“Pen?” Tony can’t hear anything she’s saying, if she is saying anything, and he keeps thinking of every single thing in that bathroom. Probably a razor, she can break the glass of the mirror or the shower, there’s plenty of heavy things if she wanted to damage herself other than cutting. He can’t let her hurt herself, not again, not when he’s right there to help her, to save her. “Penny, please,” he begs.

Inside of her own bubble of extremities, Penny’s panic and anxiety begins to talk as if no one is there. “I was never good enough. I was never good enough. I should’ve never have met you, you should have found someone better than me-stronger and more beautiful and better than me-someone better!”

Her words break him more than anything she’s ever said.

Tony breathes out shakily and slides down so that he’s sitting against the door. “Penny…Penny, I would walk through hell and back to make sure I met you. My life wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t had met you.”

Penny shakes her head. “Why-why do you care about me so much I’ve never been good enough I’m not an Avenger-“

“Because I love you!”

Everything including her heart stops, her jaw slowly dropping in the process.

Tony’s mouth is still open, feeling like an idiot who didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t, in fact, know what he was doing, but he _was_ doing his damn best to help her and that was what mattered. He startled himself just as much as much as he knew he startled her. Finally, Tony lets himself breathe out. “I never thought I was having kids…Even if I wanted them, my dad wasn’t a great role model, so I was too scared to have them. But then I met you and I never realized how meeting a fourteen-year-old from Queens would be one of the most important days of my life until not long ago. Penny, I love you and Pepper more than anything.”

“Why?” Penny whispers at a volume she hoped wouldn’t be audible. “Why me?”

She was wrong. “You are one of three of the most brilliant people I know on this Earth. You can do and understand things that practically no kid can do-sometimes you think of things I don’t and it reminds me of how capable you are. You’re the brightest light around-if you smile, I smile-if I was having a heart attack and you made one of the worst puns in the world-I’d laugh. You may not think SpiderGirl is a very special superhero but she is to the team, the city-she is to me. You’ve always been good enough-more than good enough, Pen.”

Penny is in disbelief. All these words of love and positivity and compliments come out of his mouth and she just can’t comprehend it all. She tries to clear her nose, still sitting in the bathroom’s black night, seeing nothing on the outside just as much as she sees nothing on the inside.

“You’re ten times kinder of a person than I was at thirty years old, you are beautiful inside and out-you have a zest for life that I could never ever have-when I see you smile, I just can’t fucking help but smile, too...How could I not love you?”

Penny’s quiet, trying to still clear her nose and maybe, just maybe calm herself. She doesn’t want to turn the lights on, but she wants to see. What’s there to see except possible things to hurt herself with, though? That must be what he’s been thinking, right?

He closes his eyes. “You’re my kid…I’ve gotta make sure you know how great you are. I can’t let you hurt…I’m so sorry I’m not your dad, I’m sorry I’m not Ben. I’m sorry all you have is me-I suck, ok? I’m not meant to be a parent, but at this, point, it’s instinct to try.”

There is only silence between the two of them for one minute. Two. Three.

The doorknob turns and the door opens, at long last, to reveal Penny’s face, eyes deep in salty tears and agony.

Tony, still sitting on the ground, holds his eye contact with hers, but nothing is said. Crystal orbs to brown ones said enough.

The tears from Penny’s eyes resume, even though she doesn’t want to show it to him. She doesn’t want him to see how she feels so much of her life, now. “I’m fine, I’m good.”

She tried really hard, it’s one of the things Penny did best. But when he took her hand in his to comfort, she collapsed, instead.

Penny’s embraced by him and, despite thinking she was out of tears to cry, more and more come out. But there’s something different, this time. The warmth…it was the true warmth she’d been looking for this whole day. Not the bed, not the blanket, but him. All she needed was him.

Tony rubs his hand up and down her back, something his mother did to comfort him when he was just a kid. “You’re gonna be ok. You’re gonna be ok, baby,” he murmurs soothingly. All he could do was try his best. He didn’t know what to do in every situation and he wasn’t magic. Tony was only himself, and if all he had was himself, it was better than nothing.

Time stretches and Penny’s heart rate slows, her blood pressure dropping, tear stains becoming a thing of the past. She hears Tony’s heartbeat loudly beating. It was close proximity and her powers. No more cold. No more thinking of her scars. She’s just thinking that she’s safe. It’s ok. She’s alright.

“The movie’s probably over now,” Penny finally whispers even though she doesn’t know how long it’s been.

“It’s alright, Friday probably paused it.”

Penny pulls away. She still feels warm, even as she stands up slowly away from Tony. She feels lost, unsure of what to do. She doesn’t look at her arm, but she doesn’t cry, either. The teen is still in a dark hallway.

Tony begins to stand up and wonders what’s taking Happy so long to pick May up. It was a bit late for traffic. Once up, noticing Penny is still sitting on the ground, he offers her his hand.

Penny, in the aftershock of her panic, takes a few seconds to process. He’s right. Tony will never be her biological father or Uncle Ben…but he can be Tony, and not just Iron Man, but the Tony Stark she’s known to come and love. He may have the world’s back, but she has his hand.

She takes it, standing up, feeling almost wobbly. He guides her out of the dark hallway and back to the living room. Tony was right: Friday had paused the movie as soon as they left.

“We can light this candle, if you want,” Tony refers to the one sitting on the coffee table. It was one of the massive, three-figure-costing Jo Malone candles, peony blush suede, he was sure.

Penny grabs the lighter, opening the candle top and carefully lighting each wick. The little flames brought a different energy to the room, one that brought her security and warmth. There was so much warmth from these different things, like bubble-wrap making her feel like nothing won’t hurt her, even after all of the pain she’s experienced. It helps the aftershock of the panic cease and leave her. Maybe it won’t be dormant, now, or at least not all of it. Maybe some of it would actually leave.

The movie resumes and, soon enough, Penny grows sleepy on the sofa. Between the blanket, the mostly dark environment, and her very long day, she’s just losing her focus on the movie-even if it is really good.

When Penny yawns, Tony turns to look at her. “You tired?”

“No, no, I’m good,” she says while still yawning.

“You can go to bed in your guestroom, you know?” Tony suggests. “We can finish the movie another time.”

“No, I’m good, Mr. Stark,” Penny murmurs, leaning back into the sofa as far as she could go.

After all this time, she still doesn’t call him Tony. It doesn’t bother him, or anything, he just finds it hilarious.

Soon enough, the movie is only thirty minutes from finishing, but Penny’s growing tired and desperate for sleep. “Msrstark, would it be weird if I lied down?” she asks sleepily before giving into her love for oreos and eating two.

Lied down? He already was, it was a pretty big sectional-style sofa, but still while sitting up. Like against him, or that he got up and sat somewhere else? He didn’t care, really, he just didn’t know. “No, it’s not weird,” Tony answers.

Penny breathes out and immediately does so, lying down as comfortably as she can. She tugs the weighted blanket up so that it serves as a pillow over Tony’s stomach. Once she’s down, she’s down, only stretching her legs a bit so that the joints pop. The sound of his heartbeat overshadows any other noises that could come to her ears.

He’s surprised. Is she this affectionate or is it just the sleepiness? Tony doesn’t care why, as long as she’s comfortable. Maybe it’s weird, but it’s comforting for him, too. But then, he remembers how his mother comforted him as a young boy-even when he was a little bit older, as well. This wasn’t abnormal…this was just love.

Tony didn’t always understand love, especially as he grew up. He only first started to understand it when he met Pepper. There was no woman he could ever adore more, and it was showed by how hard he tried. From there, he learned what love really meant in his friendships and now, Penny.

Sometimes, love wasn’t straightforward. Couple has baby, couple raises baby into child, teen, and adult. The couple loves the child no matter what, trying their best to care for it and make them the best they can be. Some couples have them biologically, some adopt. But Tony? He met fourteen-year-old Penny wanting to recruit her for her talents. If he told himself years ago that they’d be where they were right now, he’d roll his eyes. If only he knew.

Tony understands it better, now. Everything he’s done for her big, small, and between is parental love. It started at mentorship, but it progressed beyond that. Penny’s his kid. When he finally realized that, he knew he wouldn’t change it for the world.

It doesn’t take long for the teenage girl to finally receive the blissful sleep that she deserves. Penny breathes calmly which calms Tony. She’s safe, she’s alright. Nothings hurting or haunting her. When that happens, he can finally rest. He’s kept her safe from all including herself.

“Boss,” Friday says at the lowest audible level once the credits roll, “Mr. Hogan and Miss Parker are arriving.”

For the past twenty minutes, Tony’s watched Penny sleep. It’s alright, now. A candle burns with a lovely scent, the movie’s finished and no more tv will be watched, Stark Tower is mostly asleep during the late nighttime hour…everything’s ok.

Footsteps interrupts the thought process, the only expected figure appearing in the room. May’s been crying and looks like a mess from it. The worry of a mother is obvious. She walks slowly to the scene of Penny asleep against Tony. She looks better than she has in…weeks? Has it really been weeks? “Tony,” May starts quietly, voice groggy from crying, “Is she alright?”

Alright? For now, she is. Penny has a long road to go. But he swears that no matter what it takes, he will hold her hand as he goes down it with her. “Yeah. She’s alright.”

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed the fic! That was....a lot, in my opinion. Again if you liked it, I'd love to see your comments and kudos! Thank you so much for reading! It means the world to me! :D


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